Cellular-related quality of service (“QoS”) issues are a significant source of frustration for service providers as well as their customers. Common QoS issues include bandwidth limitations, jitter, delay and latency, packet loss, and interference. QoS issues may result in a number of problems for customers, potentially causing customers to change service providers. In one example, a customer may experience a “dropped call,” in which a phone call unexpectedly ends. In another example, a customer may experience a slow data transfer rate that is not suitable for transferring high-bandwidth content, such as video and music. QoS problems may result in unacceptable quality of service, causing customer dissatisfaction ranging from annoyance to anger.
In addition to conventional cellular services, such as voice and text messages, modern cellular devices are capable of, among other things, playing music, displaying video, and surfing the Internet. As broadband Internet access has become more pervasive at home and in the office, an increasing number of cellular customers are demanding that their cellular networks be able to provide similar speed and throughput as other broadband technologies, such as digital subscriber line (“DSL”) and cable modem. In particular, cellular customers commonly use their cellular devices to access real-time and near real-time multimedia and other high bandwidth content for business (e.g., virtual meetings) and pleasure (e.g., streaming music and video).
To address the above demands of the cellular customers, cellular service providers are constantly improving their cellular networks. For example, cellular service providers may increase the channel capacity and throughput of cellular towers. However, as a general matter, an increase in the amount of data transmitted from a cellular tower to cellular devices results in one or more of the cellular tower utilizing additional power, power at an additional time, power at an additional frequency, and/or power via an additional code. As a result of the increase in power and/or added instances of power, co-interference between the communications associated with cellular devices, especially those within closer proximity (e.g., in urban and metropolitan areas), is more likely to increase.